Abstract:
The Global Rain Forest Mapping Project (GRFM) is an effort led by the Earth Observation Research Center (EORC) of the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) in cooperation with, among others, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA's Alaska SAR Facility (ASF), the Space Applications Institute of the Joint Research Centre ... of the European Commission (JRC/SAI), the Unversity of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the National Institute for Research of the Amazon(INPA). Its goal is to acquire contiguous Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data sets of the Earth's major rain forests using the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite (JERS-1 or FUYO-1).

This project is divided into three geographical regions : South and Central America, Central and Western Africa, and South-East Asia and Northern Australia. Each region was observed at least once during a "single season" between September 1995 and January 1997.